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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

TPB-AFK: The Official The Pirate Bay Documentary Available for Download and Viewing Out Now

The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard is a grim documentary that follows the founders of TPB during the trials in Sweden up until the final verdict—produced by Simon Klose as a documentary of TPB’s impact, both cultural and personal—and now it’s been released for free as a BitTorrent (indexed on TPB itself) and as a YouTube video that you can watch right now.

The Pirate Bay has been a force for upheaval in the technological world of the Internet now for almost a decade, the founders have been raided, put on trial, and become the center of a controversy that has rocked the entire Internet. In 2009, the founders were found guilty of this era’s weirdest crime—facilitating the illegal downloading of copyrighted material—and sentenced to a year in prison and US $3.5M in fines. ISPs in fourteen countries have been ordered to block the website.

What does it do? It indexes BitTorrent links, permitting people to find and download information from the network and join into swarms. They’re not the only BitTorrent index in the world (certainly not anymore) but they’re one of the most well known and even with ISPs blocking them left and right they’ve become one of the most proxied sites on the Internet.

People, not renegades, caught up in a maelstrom of cultural change

TPB-AFK is a film four years in the making, starting with the 2008 charges against Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Peter Sunde for running The Pirate Bay.

Unlike previous file sharing services, The Pirate Bay doesn’t house and copyrighted material on their servers, only links to how they can be accessed on a distributed network generated by BitTorrent users. This is much in the same way Google indexes links to pages on the Web. As a tool, BitTorrent is used constantly to distribute large files for multimedia and gaming (including uses by free-to-play MMO games and even World of Warcraft to distribute patches.)

However, the capability for The Pirate Bay to facilitate the download of potentially copyrighted material (even with a cornucopia of legitimate uses available) made TPB a target for copyright cartels around the world and as highlighted in the documentary they went for their pound of flesh.

While the founders may have lost their court case, TPB has never been successfully snuffed. With each new tactic used to shut it down, it simply evolved to become more difficult to stop. Since TPB doesn’t actually house much content but a tiny amount of data for each torrent, it became possible to distribute the entire thing across numerous servers, with an easily moved router for getting it onto the web. There had also been talk of putting it onto autonomous drones hovering around (eschewed for a cloud solution.)

Attempts to stifle The Pirate Bay by blocking it in the UK lead to a boom of proxies in other countries, antagonizing censorship with the old adage: “The Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it.” During that period, the use of VPN by youth went up as more people start to make their communications private instead of let their ISP know that they were doing.

Many of these attempts to censor The Pirate Bay have instead brought a spotlight to why censorship doesn’t work: it only trammels the ability for legitimate, honest, or uneducated Internet users to go about their business. Everyone else? They just fired up the nearest TPB proxy, turned on their VPN, or otherwise totally ignored the blocks.

The effect of TPB can be felt across the world as many eyes have been watching what happened to the founders and how insane the cases against them seemed to be. In the United States, copyright bills that stifled free speech, such as SOPA and PROTECTIP, rose up and were swiftly beaten down. Populations across the world have become wary of Internet censorship in their countries, but the battle for hearts-and-minds and the ability to use the Internet is hardly over.

“The Pirate Bay has been one of the most important movements in Sweden for freedom of speech, working against corruption and censorship,” TPB co-founder Peter Sunde is quoted as saying.

TPB-AFK is an in-depth look into the travails of the founders of this interesting conduit for discussion on freedom of speech and information on the Internet. It is a must-watch.

About Kyt Dotson

Kyt Dotson is a Senior Editor at SiliconAngle and works to cover beats surrounding DevOps, security, gaming, and cutting edge technology. Before joining SiliconAngle, Kyt worked as a software engineer starting at Motorola in Q&A to eventually settle at Pets911.com where he helped build a vast database for pet adoption and a lost and found system. Kyt is a published author who writes science fiction and fantasy works that incorporate ideas from modern-day technological innovation and explore the outcome of living with those technologies.